A Thousand Splendid Suns is an opera with music by American composer Sheila Silver and an English-language libretto by Stephen Kitsakos, based on the popular novel by Khaled Hosseini.
I will include tabla and bansuri (bamboo Indian flute) in my otherwise Western orchestra.”[6] Silver dedicated her opera's score to “Pandit Kedar Narayan Bodas, who invited me into the inner sanctum of his Hindustani musical family and taught me with patience and love, inspiring the sound world for A Thousand Splendid Suns.”[7] The world premiere production was conducted by Indian-American maestro Viswa Subbaraman, who grew up listening to the Carnatic music of southern India.
[8] Renowned percussionist Deep Singh, who at the age of seven became the youngest disciple of Ustad Allah Rakha (father and teacher of Zakhir Hussain) played tabla.
The world premiere production is to be directed by Roya Sadat, who was named one of the BBC's 100 Women for 2021 for her trailblazing work as one of Afghanistan's first female film directors.
Workshops of A Thousand Splendid Suns, all undertaken in collaboration with American Opera Projects, involved director Leslie Swackhamer, conductor Sara Jobin, and soprano Lucy FitzGibbon as Laila.
They included: Fifteen-year-old Mariam, the cast-off bastard child of a rich father, is forced to leave her rural home after her mother's suicide and marry a middle-aged shoe-maker from Kabul named Rasheed.
Years later, as competing factions of sectarian warlords secure a stranglehold on Kabul, a bomb explodes in Mariam's neighborhood killing the parents of fourteen-year-old Laila, a modern, educated, ravishing beauty.
Rasheed, now a sixty-year-old man, schemes to get Laila to marry him by concocting a story that her beloved fiancée, Tariq, who was forced to flee to Pakistan a few weeks earlier with his parents, has been killed.